


Private Kim

by JNovak



Category: GOT7, 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 20:47:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14880932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JNovak/pseuds/JNovak
Summary: "They've gone now, and I'm alone at last. I have the whole night ahead of me, and I won't waste a single moment of it..I want tonight to be long, as long as my life..."As young Kim Taehyung looks back over his childhood from the battlefields of The Korean War, his memories are full of family life deep in the countryside.But the clock is ticking, and every moment he spends remembering how things used to be, means another moment closer to something that will change his life forever.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to be accurate when writing this story, but I am by no means an expert on the Korean war, or the country's older culture.  
> This is pretty much a book I read over and over as a kid, and was so moved for it, I thought, why not adapt it around my favourite people?

**FIVE PAST TEN**

They’ve gone now, and I’m alone at last. I have the whole night ahead of me, and I won’t waste a single moment of it. I shan’t sleep it away. I won’t dream it away either. I mustn’t, because every moment of it will be far too precious.

I want to try to remember everything, just as it was, just as it happened. I’ve had nearly eighteen years of yesterdays and tomorrows, and tonight I must remember as many of them as I can. I want tonight to be long, as long as my life, not filled with fleeting dreams that rush me on towards dawn.

Tonight, more than any other night of my life, I want to feel alive.

 

Yoongi is taking me by the hand, leading me because he knows I don’t want to go. I’ve never worn a collar before and it’s choking me. My boots are strange and heavy on my feet. My heart is heavy too, because I dread what I am going to. Yoongi has told me often how terrible this school-place is: about Mr. Ko and his raging tempers and the long whipping cane he hangs on the wall above his desk.

Big Brother Jin doesn’t have to go to school and I don’t think that’s fair at all. He’s much older than me. He’s even older than Yoongi and he’s never been to school. He stays at home with Mother, and sits up in his tree singing _Oranges and Lemons_ , and laughing. Big Brother Jin is always happy, always laughing. I wish I could be happy like him. I wish I could be at home like him. I don’t want to go with Yoongi. I don’t want to go to school.

I look back, over my shoulder, hoping for a reprieve, hoping that Mother will come running after me and take me home. But she doesn’t come and she doesn’t come, and school and Mr. Ko and his cane are getting closer with every step.

“Piggyback?” says Yoongi. He sees my eyes full of tears and knows how it is. Yoongi always knows how it is. He’s three years older than me, so he’s done everything and knows everything. He’s strong too, and very good at piggybacks. So I hop up and cling on tight, crying behind my closed eyes, trying not to whimper out loud. But I cannot hold back my sobbing for long because I know that this morning is not the beginning of anything – not new and exciting as Mother says it is - but rather the end of my beginning. Clinging on round Yoongi’s neck I know that I am living the last moments of my carefree time, that I will not be the same person when I come home this afternoon.

I open my eyes and see a dead crow hanging from the fence, his beak open. Was he shot, shot in mid-scream, as he began to sing? He sways, his feathers still catching the wind even in death, his family and friends cawing their grief and anger from the high oak trees above us. I am not sorry for him. It could be him that drove away my wren and emptied her nest of eggs. My eggs. Five of them there had been, live and warm under my fingers. I remember I took them out one by one and laid them in the palm of my hand. I wanted them for my tin, to blow them like Yoongi did and lay them in cotton wool with my Thrush and my Starling’s eggs. I would have taken them, but something made me hesitate. The wren was watching me from Father’s rose bush, begging me.

Father was in that bird’s eyes. Under the rose bush, deep down, buried in the wormy earth were all his precious things. Mother had put in his pipe first. The Yoongi had laid his hobnail boots side by side, curled into each other, sleeping. Jin knelt down and covered the boots in Father’s old scarf.

“Your turn, Tae-Tae,” Mother said. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was holding the gloves that he’d worn the morning he died. I remembered picking one of them up. I knew what they did not know, what I could never tell them.

Mother helped me to do it in the end, so that Father’s gloves lay there on top of his scarf, palms uppermost, thumbs touching. I felt those hands willing me not to do it, willing me to think again, not to take the eggs. Not to take what was not mine. So I didn’t do it. Instead I watched them grow, saw the first scrawny skeletal stirrings, the nest of gaping, begging beaks, the frenzied screeching at feeding time; witnessed too late from my bedroom window the last of the early-morning massacre, the parent wrens watching like me, distraught and helpless, while the marauding crows made off skywards cackling, their murderous deed done. I don’t like crows. I’ve never liked crows. The crow hanging there on the fence got what he deserved. That’s what I think.

Yoongi is finding the hill up into the village hard-going. I can see the church tower and below it the roof of the school. My mouth is dry with fear. I cling on tighter.

“First day’s the worst, Tae” Yoongi’s saying, breathing hard. “It’s not so bad. Honest.” Whenever Yoongi says “Honest”, I know it’s not true. “Anyway I’ll look after you.”

That I do believe, because he always has. He does look after me too, setting me down, and walking me through all the boisterous banter of the school yard, his hand on my shoulder, comforting me, protecting me.

The school bell rings and we line up in two silent rows, about twenty children in each. I recognise some of them from Sunday school. I look around and realise Yoongi is no longer beside me. He’s in the other line, and he’s winking at me. I blink back and he laughs. I can’t wink with one eye, not yet. Yoongi always thinks that’s very funny. Then I see Mr. Ko standing on the school steps cracking his knuckles in the suddenly silent school yard. He has tufty cheeks and a big belly under his waistcoat. He has a gold watch open in his hand. It’s his eyes that are frightening and I know they are searching me out.

“Aha!” He cries, pointing right at me. Everyone has turned to look. “A new boy, a new boy to add to my trials and tribulations. Was not one Kim enough? What have I done to deserve another one? First a Kim Yoongi, and now a Kim Taehyung. Is there no end to my woes? Understand this, Kim Taehyung, that here I am your lord and master. You do what I say when I say it. You do not lie, you do not cheat, you do not blaspheme. You do not come to school in bare feet. And your hands will be clean. These are my commandments. Do I make myself absolutely clear?”

“Yes Sir,” I whisper, surprised I can find my voice at all.

We file past him, hands behind our backs. Yoongi smiles across at me as the two lines part: “Little ones” into my classroom, “Big ones” into his. I’m the littlest of the little ones. Most of the big ones are even bigger than Yoongi, fourteen years old some of them. I watch him until the door closes behind him and he’s gone. Until this moment I have never known what it is to feel truly alone.

My bootlaces are undone. I can’t tie laces. Yoongi can, but he’s not here. I hear Mr. Ko’s thunderous voice next door calling the roll and I am so glad we have Miss Zhao. She may speak with a strange accent, but at least she smiles, and she’s not Mr. Ko.

“Taehyung,” she tells me, “you will be sitting there, next to Jimin. And your laces are undone.”

Everyone seems to be titterring at me as I take my place. All I want to do is try to escape, but I don’t dare do it. All I can do is cry. I hang my head so they can’t see my tears.

“Crying won’t do your laces up, you know,” Miss Zhou says.

“I can’t, Miss,” I tell her.

“Can’t is not a word we use in my class, Kim Taehyung,” she says. “We shall just have to teach you. That’s what we’re all here for, Taehyung – to learn. That’s why we come to school, don’t we? Jimin, you show him. Jimin’s the oldest boy in my class, and my best pupil. He’ll help you.”

So while she calls the roll Jimin kneels down in front of me and does up my laces. He ties laces very differently from Yoongi, delicately, more slowly, in a great loopy double knot. He doesn’t look up at me as he’s doing it, not once, and I wish he would. He has hair the same colour as Geon, Father’s old horse – jet black and shining – and I want to reach out and touch it. Then he looks up at me at last and smiles. It’s all I need.  Suddenly I no longer want to run home. I want to stay here with Jimin. I know I have a friend.

In playtime, I want to go over and talk to him, but I can’t because he’s always surrounded by a gaggle of big ones. I look for Yoongi, but he’s with his friends, all of them big ones. I go to sit on an old tree stump. I undo my bootlaces and try to do them up again, remembering how Jimin did it. After only a short while, I find I can do it. Best of all, from across the yard Jimin sees I can do it, and grins at me.

At home we don’t wear boots, except for church. Mother does of course, and Father always wore his great hobnail boots, the boots he died in. When the tree came down I was there in the wood with him, just the two of us. Before I ever went to school he’d often take me off to work with him, to keep me out of trouble, he said. I’d ride up behind him on Geon and hang on round his waist, my face pressed into his back. Whenever Geon broke into a gallop I’d love it. We’d galloped all the way that morning. I was still giggling when he lifted me down.

“Off you go, you scallywag, you,” he said. “Enjoy yourself.”

I hardly needed to be told. There were deer prints to follow, perhaps, flowers to pick, or butterflies to chase. But that morning I found a dead mouse. I buried it. I was making a wooden cross for it. Father was chopping away rhythmically nearby, grunting at every stroke as he always did.

It sounded at first as if Father was just grunting a bit louder. But then, strangely, the sound seemed to be coming not from where he was, but from somewhere high up in the branches. I looked up to see the great tree above me swaying while all the others were standing still. It was creaking when all the others were silent. Only slowly did I realise that It was falling, and when it did it would land right on top of me, that I was going to die and there was nothing I could do about it. I stood and stared, mesmerised at the gradual fall of it, legs frozen under me.

I can hear Father shouting: “Tae! Tae! Run, Tae!” But I can’t. I see Father running towards me through the tree, shirt flailing. I feel him catch me up and toss me aside in one movement, like a rice bag. There I s a roaring thunder in my ears and then no more.

When I wake I see Father at once, the soles of his boots with their worn nails. I crawl over to where he is lying, pinned to the ground under the leafy crown of the great tree. He is on his back, his face turned away from me as if he doesn’t want me to see. One arm is outstretched towards me, glove fallen off, his finger pointing at me.  There is blood coming from his nose, dropping in the leaves. His eyes are open, but I know at once they are not seeing me. He is not breathing. When I shout at him, when I shake him, he does not wake up. I pick up his glove.

In the church we’re sitting side by side in the front row, Mother, Big Jin, Yoongi and me. We’ve never in our lives sat in the front row before. Its where the Colonel and his family always sit. The coffin rests on trestles, my father inside in his Sunday suit. A swallow swoops over our heads all through the prayers, the hymns, flitting from window to window, from the belfry to the altar, looking for some way out. And I know for certain it is Father trying to escape. I know it because he’d told us more than once that in his next life he’d like to be a bird, so that he could fly free wherever he wanted.

Big Jin keeps pointing at the swallow. Then without any warning he gets up and walks to the back of the church where he opens the door. When he gets back he explains to Mother what he’s done in his loud voice, and Grandma Wolf scowls at him, at all of us. I know then what I never understood before, that she is ashamed to be one of us. I didn’t really understand why until later, until I was older.

The swallow sits perched on a rafter high above the coffin. It lifts off and swoops up and down the aisle until at last it finds the door and is gone. And I know that Father is happy now in his next life. Big Jin laughs out loud and Mother takes his hand in hers. Yoongi catches my eye. At that moment all four of us are thinking the very same thing.

The Colonel gets up on the pulpit to speak. He claims that Kim Minhyuk was a good man, one of the best workers he has ever known, always cheerful as he went about his work, that the Kim family had been employed, in one capacity or another, by his for five generations. All the while he drones I’m thinking of the rude things Father used to say about him – “silly old fart” or “mad old dog”.

Afterwards we all gather round the grave and Father’s lowered down, and the vicar won’t stop talking. I want Father to hear the birds one last time before the earth closes in on top of him and he has nothing left but silence. Father loves larks, loves watching them rising, rising so high you can only see their song. I look up hoping for a lark, and there is a Tit singing from a birch tree. It will have to do… I hear Mother whispering to Big Jin that Father is not really in his coffin anymore, but in heaven up there – she’s pointing up into the sky beyond the church tower – and that he’s happy, happy as the birds. The earth thuds and thumps on the coffin behind us as we drift away, leaving him. We walk home together, Big Jin plucking at the hibiscus and the roses, filling Mother’s hands with flowers, and none of us has any tears to cry or words to say. Me least of all. For I have inside me a secret so horrible, I can never tell anyone. Not even Yoongi. Father needn’t have died that morning. He was trying to save me. If only I had tried to save myself, if I had run, he would not now be lying dead in his coffin. As Mother smooths my hair and Big Jin offers her yet another rose, all I can think is that I have caused this.

I have killed my own father.


	2. Chapter 2

**TWENTY TO ELEVEN**

 

I don't want to eat. Stew, potatoes and biscuits. I usually like stew, but I've no appetite for it. I nibble at a biscuit, but I don't want that either. Not now. It's a good thing

Grandma Wolf is not here. She always hated us leaving food on our plates. “Waste not, want not,” she’d say. I’m wasting this, Wolfwoman, whether you like it or not.

 

Big Jin ate more than all the rest of us put together. Anything Yoongi or I didn’t like we’d shuffle onto his plate when Mother wasn’t looking. Big Jin always liked the conspiracy of that. When we were little, before we knew any better, Yoongi once bet me an owl’s skull I’d found that Jin would even eat rabbit droppings. I couldn’t believe he would, because I thought that Jin must know what they are. So I took the bet. Yoongi put a handful of them in a paper bag and told him they were sweets. Big Jin took them out the bag and popped them down, savouring every one of them. And when we laughed, he laughed too and offered us one each. But Yoongi said they were especially for him, a present.

Mother told us when we were older that Big Jin had nearly died after he was born. Meningitis, they told her at the hospital. The doctor said Jin had brain damage, that he’d be no use to anyone, even if he lived. But Big Jin did live, and he did get better, though never completely. As we were growing up, all that we knew was that he was different. When Mother had found out what we’d done with the rabbit droppings, she’d made both Yoongi and I eat one each as punishment, so that we’d know what I was like.

“Horrible, isn’t it?” she said. “Horrible food for horrible children. Don’t you treat Big Jin like that ever again.”

We felt very ashamed of ourselves – for a while, anyway. Ever since someone has only to mention rabbits, for Yoongi and I to smile at one another and remember. It’s making me smile again now, even just thinking about it. It shouldn’t – but it does.

It was Big Jin who got me into my first fight. There was a lot of fighting at school, but I was never much good at it and always seemed to end up getting a swollen lip or a bleeding ear. I learned soon enough that if you don’t want to get hurt you keep your head down and don’t answer back, especially if the other fellow is bigger. But one day I discovered that sometimes you’ve got to stand up for what’s right, even when you don’t want to.

It was playtime. Big Jin came up to the school to see Yoongi and me. He just stood and watched us from outside the gate. He did that often when Yoongi and I first went off to school together – I think he was lonely at home without us. I ran over to him. He was breathless, bright eyed with excitement. He had something to show me. He opened his cupped hands just enough for me to be able to see. There was a gecko curled up inside. I stroked it with my finger, and said it was lovely, which it was. Then he wandered off, walking down the lane humming Oranges and Lemons as he went, gazing down in wonder at his beloved gecko.

I am watching him go when someone taps me hard on the shoulder, enough to hurt. It is big Choi Minseok, Yoongi has often warned me about him, told me to keep out of his way. “Who’s got a loony for a brother?” he says, sneering at me.

I cannot believe what he’s just said, not at first. “What did you say?”

“Your brother’s a loony, off his head, nuts.”

I go for him then, fists flailing, screaming at him, but I don’t manage to land a single punch. He hits me full in the face and sends me sprawling. I find myself suddenly sitting on the ground, wiping blood from my nose and looking at the blood on the back of my hand. Then he puts the boot in, hard. I curl up in a ball like an Echidna to protect myself, but it doesn’t do much good. He just goes on kicking. When he finally stops I wonder why.

I look up to see Yoongi grabbing him round the neck and pulling him to the ground. They’re rolling over and over, punching and swearing. The whole school has gathered round to watch now, egging them on. That’s when Mr. Ko comes running out of the school, roaring like a raging bull. He pulls them apart, takes them by the collars and dragging them off. Yoongi gets the cane, and so does Minseok – six strokes each. There rest of us stand there in silence, listening to the strokes and counting them. Minseok gets it first, and he keeps crying out: “Ow, sir! Ow, sir! Ow, sir!” But when it’s Yoongi’s turn, all we hear are the whacks, and then the silences in between. I am so proud of him for that. I have the bravest brother in the world.

Jimin comes over and, taking me by the hand, leads me towards the pump. He soaks his handkerchief under it and rubs my nose and my hands and my knee – the blood seems to be everywhere. The water is wonderfully cold and soothing, and his hands are soft. He doesn’t say anything for a while. He’s dabbing me very gently, so as not to hurt me. Then all of a sudden he says “I like Big Jin. He’s kind. I like people who are kind.”

Jimin likes Big Jin. Now I know for sure I will love him til the day I die.

After a while Yoongi came out into the schoolyard hitching up his trousers and grinning in the sunshine.  Everyone was crowding around him.

“Did it hurt, Yoongi?”

Yoongi never said a word to them. He just walked right through everyone and came straight over to me and Jimin.

“He won’t do it again, Tae,” he said. “I hit him where it hurts, in the goolies.” He lifted my chin and peered at my nose. “Are you alright, Tae-Tae?”

“Hurts a bit,” I told him.

“So does my bum,” said Yoongi.

Jimin laughed then, and so did I. So did Yoongi, and so did the whole school. 

From that moment on Jimin became one of us. It was as if he had suddenly joined our family and become our brother. When Jimin came home with us that afternoon Big Jin gave him some flowers he’d picked, and Mother treated him like her son. After that, Jimin came home with us almost every afternoon. He seemed to want to be with us all the time.

Soon after, as Father was no longer earning, Mother was forced to take a housekeeping job up at the colonel's estate. While she was away, she had no choice but to bring Grandma Wolf into the home, which seemed now more like her lair. She ruled over us with an iron fist, not allowing Jin to go on his wanders as he'd always loved to do.She was forever telling Mother that she had not raised us right, that we didn't know right from wrong - and that Mother had married beneath her. We longed for Mother to stand up for her, but each time she just gave in meekly - too worn out to do anything else. To Yoongi and I she seemed to have become a different person. There was no laughter in her voice, no light in her eyes.

I remember I used to have many nightmares in that time. Whatever the nightmare, it would always end the same way. I would be out in the woods with Father and the tree would be falling, and I'd wake up screaming. Then Yoongi would be there and everything would be alright again. Yoongi always made things all right again.


End file.
